Youth/Childhood

The work of Dani Leventhal explores the complicated space that exists between decay and renewal, intimacy and disconnection and the sacred and mundane. The six pieces that comprise Dani Leventhal Videoworks: Volume 1 each examine these ambiguous emotional and psychic spaces through a use of montage that is at once both unstructured and dispassionate and lyrically sentimental.

The Videofreex tape a group of young people working on a farm run by Chris Locke and his wife in Shandaken, NY.  After learning how to take care of the chickens, they are taught how to kill and pluck one.  Later they sit down for a communal dinner, and one of the group exclaims "Mmmmm, tastes good!"

Double Sigh is a video in which my mother reenacts a moment from my adolescence. In confronting the viewer directly, my mother's anger, frustration and sadness are imposed on the audience.

-- Julia Hechtman

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

A high & low fidelity record of obsessions past & present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman named Shadow-La and a girl in a rose colored wig. Belinda (Heaven on Earth), Madonna (Live to Tell), and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. Home. The Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1980. That orange bedspread, that red flowered couch.

Pictures from Dorothy is a current day consideration of the symbolism of Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.

Cast: Matilda Washington. Music: David Reid.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver is explored.

"Out of the blue, I bought my first television. I kept the TV on all the time."

--Andy Warhol

"Jesse McLean’s 20-minute video Magic for Beginners is an intermittently gripping, psychedelic montage revolving around childhood obsessions with Leonardo DiCaprio and the video game Tron."

"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.